Pre-Code Capsules: THE MAD GENIUS, UNION DEPOT, WATERLOO BRIDGE, THREE FACES EAST, DANGEROUS CORNER

THE MAD GENIUS

1931 - Dir Michael Curtiz

***1/2

TCM finally showed The Mad Genius (1931), a film I've wanted to see for so many years I all but gave up and figured it was a myth, but now... at long last, here it is, filling a gaping hole in my heart, providing the sordid pre-code Barrymore 'impresario-and-theatrical protege' cross strut between the same year's more cinematic and dreamy Svengali (here)and 1934's Twentieth Century. Indeed they all follow the same plot, one more than familiar to show biz types: a middle-aged but still dashing impresario (Barrymore in all three) seeing the potential in dopey young bumpkins and dragging it out of them while meddling in and/or dominating their love lives. In this case it's man-on-man action, with Barrymore as Tsarakov, the club footed son of a ballet dancer and a Russian duke (who doesn't claim him), tortured with genius and longing for dance. We first spy him doing puppet show ballets in the rain before the thighs of little Fyodor (Frankie Darro)) leaping away from his abusive Cossack father (Boris Karloff) catch his eye. Tsarakov and his long-suffering assistant (Charles Butterworth) spirit young Darro off in their gigantic carriage to conclude Act One. It was originally a play and you can tell by the way the dialogue spells out the big ambitions, triumphs, and chicanery, rather than just illustrating them in little insert scenes. But who cares since Barrymore's measured yet over-the-top Russian accent mellifluously spouts it, the expressionist sets are by Anton Grot (who also did Svengali's) and the dialogue is psychopoetically self-aware, in the best scathingly myopic Broadway tradition? 

The second act takes place fifteen years later after Darro's delivered from Karloff, and all pledged greatness has already come to pass, sparing us any boring training montages. Darro's grown into that perennially sulking leading man Donald Cook, now the greatest male ballet dancer of his time, and our once-bedraggled Tsarakov is drenched in fur and ladies. Tsarakov keeps Fyodor supplied with women and champagne but is always on the look-out to stop him falling in love with some naive marriage-minded innocent. And when Marian Marsh turns out to be just that type, craving the kind of wedlock and fealty which pleases the censors (invariably the type crept in, like a fungus harbinger of the code to come). Tsarakov must end it! For, as Lermontov well knew in The Red Shoes, putting romantic love ahead of art is death, but to fight it is a losing battle. The best Tsarakov can do is dog Fyodor's steps and remind Marian Marsh of the third act of Camille before sending her off into the diamond circlet-proffering mitts of some louche lord.

Sure it's an age-old story but the censorship-as-nature's-tyranny parallels are nonetheless clear: these innocent lovers are the harbinger of the Nazis, of Joseph Breen's racist, sexist draconian code rubric, of goddamned Norman Rockwell-cheeked mailmen and freckled youngsters and blandly healthy age-appropriate lovers singing 'sweet' style-songs (you know, the half-pint Irving Berlin-on-Benadryl imitations for the Christians who thought Glen Miller too risque). Gone will be the debauched old givers of diamond bracelets and fame in the classical arts! In with husbands and fey pianist neighbors. Out with scimitar-brandishing demimondes and in with wives in bobbed hair making breakfast while the baby cries and the man heads off to menial labor, laundry on a line stretched across the window --all the crap that so appalls poor Humbert in the final act of Lolita.

Lolita sells out to biology's pedestrian fascist squalor

But though there's some of that in The Mad Genius, it's still too early for it to swamp the decadent expressionistic corruption. Barrymore, outside the stuffy bourgeois costumed towers of MGM, soars sans all restraint or inhibitions. His Tsarakov doesn't mope when his star runs off, just gets royally blitzed on champagne and takes up with the newest chorus trollop (Carmel Myers, above) in a long, hilarious scene. 

I'm a big fan of Marian Marsh due to her Sgt. Pepper era-predicting look in Svengali: the oversize gendarme coat, her long straight blonde hair and Dame Darcy bangs, her sweet pixie face so perfect for hypnotizing... with Svengali a Manson-level manipulating pied piper. Here in Mad Genius that anachronistic hipness is gone. That great blonde straight hair cropped unflatteringly in the style of the time and she's got big gangly legs when she dances, like she's been studying the bowleg flapper wobble of Ruby Keeler instead of a swanky Ballets Russe pirouette. Carmel Myers (above) reminds me of one of my own past Trilbies, though, so I'm a fan, for the debauched libertine life has treated me well. The having kids and laundry lines thing pays dividends I'm sure, which we playas never care to imagine until it's too late to get them, and just as the shelf life of a dancer is very limited, and the life of a pre-revolutionary Russian dance impresario with a rolodex full of debauched libertine nobles doomed to die on the altar of art, so too louche bachelors inevitably wind up lonesome old men shuffling to and fro from the Strand, while family men bask in the alleged comfort of grandchildren.

But we're not talking real life here. These are the movies. 

And director Michael Curtiz knows we didn't come for sappy young love or Frankie Darro or regret, we came for Barrymore and blondes, and Curtiz is one of the best at zeroing in on what we want to see--in this case Anton Grot's trippy art direction (including a great pagan god stage show finale), pre-code luridness, and Barrymore's crazy eyes. For example we get Tsarakov's junkie stage manager/conductor Sergei (Luis Alberni) cracking up before the big show, trying to get Tsarakov to give him one of the envelopes of smack (or cocaine) he keeps on his person at all times, delivering a raving Dwight Frye-esque rant, the expressionist Anton Grot mood pouring the pre-code horror all over him, on and on ranting about the incessant screaming of his frayed nerves playing the same music over and over, the thud of dancer's feet, etc. Tsarakov gives him a pretty strong lecture about the joys to be had once cold turkey is endured, but then we see Sergei snort it up in the shadows and suddenly he's striding out onstage ready to go on with rehearsal as calm as a cucumber! It got a huge laugh out of me, and probably out of the play's sophisticated audience. It's a very rare moment of joking about heroin and/or cocaine addiction. Soon addicts like him would be as verboten as sleeping your way up the social ladder or getting away with murder. . 

Ach, these Philistines! The squares always get the girl in the end while the mad geniuses die crucified on the altar of their own grandiosity. So best make sure Anton Grot makes the altar for you, and let Barrymore loose upon his part like a hungry socialist wolf upon the neck of old world Europe. Let the moral majority suck up the banal happiness of the romantic age-race-gender 'appropriate' pair bond while they can. Ben Hecht cometh and Lily Garland is no Trilby, or my name isn't Oscar Jaffe! 

WATERLOO BRIDGE

1931 - Dir. James Whale

****

From a play by renowned Algonquin wit Robert E. Sherwood comes a startling, touching saga that has a great kinetic stream-of-rainy London nighttime momentum, atmosphere thick with James Whale's signature mix of midnight expressionism and cozy warmth. Roy (Douglass Montgomery) is an inexperienced Canadian soldier on his way to the front; Myra (Mae Clarke) is on her way down to the prostitution gutter. They meet while trying to help a dotty old Apple Annie-type down into the air raid shelter. Soaking wet, confused, cold, lonesome, feeling the warmth of each other's kindness, they share some food in her cold water flat while the colorful landlady (not Una O'Connor) hovers outside waiting for Myra to convince Roy it's his own idea to pay her rent . He's so excited to meet an American during an air raid and they get along so swimmingly that the whole first chunk of the movie flows almost in real time. Mae Clarke especially has never been better, tackling Sherwood's complex creation without resorting to Vivian Leigh ostentation or Harlow harshness. Love blooms quickly, after all, in wartime: marriage and combat pay making sure he doesn't die a virgin and she doesn't end up a streetwalker.

It's hard to fathom, but there it is, she meets his folks and they're rich- so the second act is all about an American struggling with the pressures of a class thing. "Some of us are lucky and some of us aren't," Roy says. "That's just the breaks?' He's Canadian, so why the hell would she want to get class-conscious with a man who will most likely die a virgin otherwise? It all makes her that much hard to bear when she starts acting noble, believing the bullshit patriarchal line about her own lack of worth. Clearly Whale doesn't believe it, nor Robert Sherwood --they love this girl and we do too. The soldier's also a surprise depth-wise: the way Montgomery plays him is years away from the usual smirky adenoidal morons of the pre-code era so often embodied by, say, William Gargan or Charley Farrell. You can tell Whale really sussed out these actors' characters for them, and their attraction feels real, like it's happening right there on screen. It's Mae Clarke's big show all the way, though, and we see how easily she might have become as iconic as Stanwyck or Harlow if the material stayed this good. Her voice crackling with alternating currents of tenderness and bitterness, body recoiling from the sordid ease with which she bilks the kid out of his bankroll, Clarke is totally stunning, and that Myra's shady past is alluded to without direct stating fits perfectly both Roy's genuine innocence and her jaded gifts with the female art of deception.

It's interesting she played the 'good girl' for Whale in FRANKENSTEIN the same year. In a sense, she's the monster here, though she's the only one with a pitchfork. It was BABY FACE and RED-HEADED WOMAN a few years later that would declare the girl didn't have throw herself into the path of a dropped bomb to spare herself the shame of having to tell her lover she's no good, just no good that's all. The great fez-wearer Frederick Kerr (above left) is also carried over from FRANKENSTEIN (or was it the other way around?) for some welcome comic relief as a semi-deaf duffer in the country estate. Bette Davis is in the 'cool younger sister-in-law' mode, who likes Myra just fine. Director Whale and Sherwood were both veterans of the WWI trenches, so there's some savvy of the slow grinding spiral of daily death-wading folded into the British fog.

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UNION DEPOT

(1932) Dir Alfred E. Green

***1/2

The best thing about the early First National-Warner's stuff is, you just never know--up to a point--what's going to happen next, especially when the focus is on an array of things going on in a train station, a scene so crowded with extras so good at seeming like they're hustling for trains we can't tell if it's not real, not a documentary. We're treated to an array of comings and goings and bag checks, all centered around two genial vagrants on the make, one of whom (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) magically winds up with a drunken Frank McHugh's bag, which happens to have a suit in it that fits Fairbanks perfectly, and a wad of bills in the pocket, and the only reason he got that was because he had lifted a train conductor's coat, literally, via a stick through the men's room window. So a chain of events is underway and neither he nor we know where it's leading.

So now Fairbanks Jr. and his pal Guy Kibbee are doing pretty well, to the point Doug attracts a chippie, then shines her off while eating a nice steak dinner, which we really feel since he's been so hungry a few beats ago. Anyway, circumstance all coheres around a counterfeiting plot and a nice violin case MacGuffin, and there's a white knuckle finale train yard brawl, Fairbanks leaping down on his quarry from atop train cars, and men being continually judged on their clothes and wallet instead of what's in their heart and fist. There's also some pre-code slams, especially when Blondell goes with Fairbanks to a private room, ready to sleep with him for train fare even though it's her first such transaction. Her fluttering mix of fear, desperation, and feigned élan is like nothing you've ever seen before or since. She also has a pretend-blind stalker pawing his way along after her, and that plus the counterfeiter getting his wallet lifted make it nail-baiting enough I shouted curtly at my girl when she tried to talk about bacon preparation right at a key moment. And I love bacon.

DANGEROUS CORNER

(1934) Dir Phil Rosen

***

Melvyn Douglas stars as a bit of a rogue in a publishing concern that--and this would be considered uncool by the early code--is co-ed-owned and operated by a group of men and women, sharing duties equally, mixing business and pleasure and turning it all into a kind of cocktails and ritzy MAD MEN-style client seducing constant. The women don't have to choose between career and romance as it's all seamlessly interwoven, noted with some interest by their best-selling author client, an Agatha Christie-type who's visiting New York to sign a contract. A blown radio tube leads to conversation about a missing chunk of cash meant to be a retainer for a different author, but the cash disappeared awhile ago and they've been avoiding dealing with it. Eventually the truth comes out but maybe sleeping dogs should lie, and maybe they still can.

One wonders, though, in the end, what the point of it all is. Did playwright J.B. Priestley need to subtextually validate why he stayed in the closet or chose not to public with his mistress? Either way it's all very mature, the idea of women being totally men's equal in every facet of their shared business is marvelously progressive, and the romantic roundelay of everyone married to the wrong person all comes to the fore pretty fast. Luckily the cast is up for the challenge and then there are numerous twists and the ending is a gotcha of the sort I normally don't approve of, but which works here as a kind of suggestion that killing yourself might just involve 'skipping' into alternate dimensions, gradually becoming immortal by living several variants of your own life all at the same time, and death just shrinking the number of available dimensional planes down farther and farther, until one's next lives have already begun so you can let the last one of the old ones go, i.e. quantum suicide.

THREE FACES EAST

(1930) Dir. Roy Del Ruth

***

With her weird Betty Boop-shaped head, Joan's sister Constance Bennett has been a weird kind of side-bet star. Always had a rare who-gives-a-fuck ease with sex and cinematic luxury, more than a hungry stage door hanger like Joan Crawford, she suggests a girl who actually lived in the manner and custom of posh art deco decadence before acting in i. She's clearly the older of the two sisters,  and they exhibit - as siblings will -- diametrically-antithetical personae. Aloof where Joan is sweet, remote where Joan is accessible, and cool where Joan is warm, etc). Here Constance uses all that older sister elan as a WWI counter-espionage double agent, posing as the wartime fiancee of the lord's killed-in-action soldier son (saying they met overseas, etc). But she's really there to open the safe and get news of how many American soldiers are coming into the war to lift France and England's sagging spirits, and when what ship will be leaving which harbor. Her handler is Erich Von Stroheim, on the scene as a butler.

Once all the fake tears and tosh manners are aside and everyone's supposedly asleep, we get some tense and sexy scenes of Bennett snooping around the mansion in the dead of night in a foxy nightgown, all very velvety in Barney McGill's black and white cinematography--with all the windows and giant doors and pin drop quiet -- the whole middle of the film sustains a delirious subtle poetry.

When they eventually talk, Erich and Constance display perfect prep school diction, speaking perfectly... clearly.. for the primitive sound equipment of 1930. Not sure the silents and the days of masochistic groveling are over, poor Erich commences his debased confessions of love to Constance, and we don't blame him. Who could resist her in all those fine glistening silks, bosom and hips heaving in the studio moonlight as Englanders in their dowdy pajamas stir into action at the strange noises she's made cracking the safe? Best of all, there's no mention made at the end or elsewhere about the daffy young English officer who professes his love for her; he's forgotten as soon as the mission is complete. Director Del Ruth wisely focuses instead on the tragic arias of Erich--in a role perhaps heralding his eventual iconic bit as Norma Desmond's butler in SUNSET BOULEVARD--and the Hurell-like shimmer of Bennet's magnificent legs as she peels off her silk stockings after a hard night spying.

All Hail the New Flesh Keychain: ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW

Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)--newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black-and-white chronicle of the last day/night of a family at Disney World--is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and animatronic vampires holding hands around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots (the movie was filmed on the sly without Disney permission), Escape's camerawork delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and instead offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis management, David Lynch post-modern prefab-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black-and-white fuzzy basement expressionism. As we watch a nuclear family implode, dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy--and papier-mâché facsimile--dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra. You wanna ride that shit? Get in line!

As the disintegrating papa, Roy Abramsohn is an ungainly blend of guarded and agape. Fired via an early morning phone call while in one of Disney's plush motels (the call taken out on the hotel balcony, to not wake the family) and then locked out on the hotel room balcony by his evil little son (and dad too polite to make a ruckus and wake his perennially irate wife), poor papa is still expected to put on a happy face, and be the spontaneity-loving mobile moneybag for his ungrateful troupe of slackjawed consumers. A pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) are his perfect objet petit a, managing to always be in front of him, from monorail to ride lines, appearing as if by magic dust, giggling amidst themselves, making flirty eye contact with his children, and expressing jubilant post-pubescent vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained between-two-young-girlfriends kind of way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father's nervous breakdown. Powerless to resist ogling them like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge in years, he's helpless to resist their gravity. And why should he? The mom (Elena Schuber) won't even accept his most rudimentary physical affection--for no reason she can really explain. We Jungians know why though - she's animus-dominated. Any emotional response she feels strongly -- positive or negative--is taken as truth. Her inner dad thinks she deserves far better, and there's no swaying such an irrational voice, and she lacks the self-perspective that would dismiss the voice as an artifact of immaturity rather than feeling the need to shut out the husband. Not to get Jungian on you, but yeah, she's a bitch. 

I've always felt that the eye of older men being drawn to younger women is analogous--not to cougars--but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children. It's not necessarily sexual, it's just an urge towards self-renewal, the drawing of a fading star to a bright young one. ESCAPE clearly agrees with me: the film becomes a reflection of the differing gender drives and how the mom-son pair bond is considered holy and the father-daughter pair bond vile. Each then becomes reprisal against the other. So which came first, man's attraction to younger women or his wife's disgust over him? Her longing for adorable-age babies, infants and cherub-faced preschoolers to fawn her kind of nonsexual adoration on, or her derided husband and outcast teenage daughter--who mom now considers a mirror-mirror rival. Shut out of the closed circuit of a son-mother pair bond--unable to raise so much as his voice--the dissolving father is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media on his role as ultimate signifier. Instead of the proper Freudian equation of father as alpha male and child envious of his priority in the mom's life, the son is priority and the father reduced to abject Oedipal exile, emasculated by the mother's literally infantile mental digression. But mom doesn't want him leaving or finding love elsewhere either. He must suffer for the crime of not measuring up to the impossible perfection demanded by her inner animus/father.  

It's just this sense of isolated exile though that frees him from duty as the ultimate signifier of the law. Why shouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, but old enough that she's equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? When the girl's too old to be cute to the mother she becomes cute to the father (and a threat to the mother). Meanwhile, to the girl, the man's wedding ring signifies both a challenge and a safety throw--a chance to feel like she's correcting the Elektra complex-exile she has herself suffered (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her responsibility in creating their shared exile, the mother sees their closeness a priori justification for her coldness.

I have a grand over-arching theory that this post-70s change in husbandry was instigated by huge films like THE EXORCIST and E.T., all of which have a conspicuous absence of the dad. He is not even present in a phone call, so mother and child bond against interlopers without him. Ever since E.T. became the new family model dads (with a few exceptions like Brody in Jaws) have been depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females (i.e. Greg Kinnear) or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, government flunkies, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia).

Older daughters meanwhile--those not devout or cheerleader bland--are Lolitas by necessity. White trash short shorts-wearing harlots! They tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or they are sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, mom glowers to the side, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to her perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own regardless of the father's presence, these moms are elevated to saints---they have no time for smiles or joy as they work two jobs to put food on the table and swat away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion that all but ensure the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu. C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?

Moi aussi, Marianne. 

But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity (and no place or time to masturbate) can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just creeped out and trying to humor you. A smart fella would know his perceptions in these matters are seldom accurate. But that takes self-perspective, experience, making enough of a fool of yourself misreading signals that you no longer believe your own impressions. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia, and then... 

Imaginationland!

Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy merely encourage this escape, or enforce it?

Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them.  I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy vs. real I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.

Ambiguity might or might not rule!

Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife, runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction (as soon as she's waved them out of sight, she breaks down (above) and it's okay since no one is watching. (Smiles are rigidly enforced by the Disney gestapo, we later learn). Dad also runs into a spooky aging Maleficient (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, and lures him into a midday tryst at the presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect a weary desperation when she tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses --and she was one of them once--when she younger--and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.

If this all sounds a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier-two Monarch programming. Is the witch some kind of manipulator/ trigger sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability? Or is she just an accidentally 'activated' Illuminati hypnotized kitten? You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the younger girls show up, he still can't get them out of his line of vision. The ride/movie becomes like the approaching pinnacle of a steep flume chute, down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snake handlers such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. But like them, Randy Moore knows that when you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you have to look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all do their bit to cement this equation. Moore's use of Disney's subversive archetypal psychology against itself constitutes a kind of psychoanalytic detournement, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but before this movie I presumed it was like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen" but Moore's film is now the new benchmark. Little moments: the pre-fireworks pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards him as he floats in the middle of the pool until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable's, Clift's and Wallach's rodeo lassos in THE MISFITS. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive witch costumes and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, and aside from a few missteps, such as a scatalogically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped) it's pretty tight with the ambiguity. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen generate absurdist post-modern unease.

If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play because they know vacations have to be more than a week long to do any good. If you go to the beach for a month, you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the crippling urgency of fun endured by working Americans whose every second spent with the kids at Disney hemorrhages their waning college fund. In France, you're never burdened with the imperative to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" --unable to shut off their motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred ideal to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work the rest of the year, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until you're finally there, and any sense of spontaneity or fun buckles under the pressure.

But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem--hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and me by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney and Epcot (shortly after the latter opened) the next. Going to Bermuda without him made me feel I had to step in, even at 11 years-old, and be the man of the family, which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room, afraid to touch anything lest we be billed for it) but at Disney my oldest man of the house status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid up front, so it was about getting as much as you could out of it. And being able to monorail back to the hotel and then return at night to Epcot was just getting the most out of the already paid $$ (which I didn't know how much the package was, hence I was free!).

I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers might be needed in Bermuda but are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time to being 22 they do not belong. Once they see a way back into the past, a chance to dive onto (or under) the passing train, they take it. They get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by younger women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. This move will only confirm mom's treatment of you as the perpetually 'in trouble' oldest son. You can try to feign spontaneity while she glowers and nags, but the bloom will not come back to her thorny rose and the souvenir 'all hail the new flesh' mouse ears have grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. When you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls, you realize it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. 

Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos. Look at this one... it's proof you had fun. You were there. 

You're even smiling! Look, Caitlin! 

Cinq à sept vs. the Censors: LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, CHLOE, LOLITA, BABY DOLL, ON THE TOWN, RED DESERT, THE BIG SLEEP

Censorship has been a constant bane of our great country, but the need to outwit dogmatic Christian 'morality' has inspired great writers and directors to new heights of sneaky double entendre. One of my favorite tricks of theirs is a common enough thing in Paris but unknown to the Christian right: the afternoon tryst. The censors of the 50s-60s never could grasp the idea of love in afternoons; sex to them was limited to one position (missionary), one place (bedroom), one time frame (night after everyone had gone to sleep). Having boys and girls even in the same room at night was presumed to leave someone pregnant by morning, but in the middle of the day these girls were safe as Fort Knox.

If anything this proves censors are both unimaginative and vile. The more tightly they try to control sex the more paranoid they get, hence the tighter the grip, and the more limited in thinking. Thus their sexual repression leads to the notion that most men change into date-raping monsters as soon as bedtime looms and the censor/camera isn't there to chaperone/spy.  They know something is going on in that fade out from night to morning --that's a long time- but not knowing what drives them insane. All men become the raging id of repressed desire, all women easily willingly overpowered. This low opinion of human behavior serves to justify the chaperone-like censor's sense of self worth, that their job mattered, they were the bulwark against the tide of baser instincts.

That doesn't mean sex wasn't all over censored films, just that there had to be a 'code' for every thing: if someone unmarried of the opposite sex did sleep over in a post-code film, for example it goes like this: If there's a fade to black after a kiss between two lovers at night, the editor can never fade out to the next day or morning. The scene must always end with him going home alone, or being interrupted by the terrified maid announcing some sinister distraction, OR the director could cut away to something, like a clock tower (in CASABLANCA) and come back to the scene with the lovers still fully dressed, but now smoking -and then you might presume (if you were over 18) that they were both just very fast dressers. But you had to show her leaving (or him) before actually she goes to sleep, nonetheless. If she or he does stay over, the butler might be shocked to see a girl lounging in his master's bed in the morning, but then find his employer not in bed beside her but in a knot of sheets on the living room couch. Whew!

In the days of the small town idyll of the soap opera 50s there was plenty of post-war modern sex colliding with pre-war small town moral hypocrisy, and movies and novels lolled in the horrific toll taken when a young free spirited girl and boy tried to stifle their romantic impulses to please the shrewish old gossips next door. A kid hangs themselves to be free of all the slander in PEYTON PLACE (1957), and in A SUMMER PLACE (1959), Sandra Dee comes home from spending the night on the beach with her boyfriend to find her mother (Constance Ford) waiting with a doctor to examine her hymen. What the fuck is this, you think, Sharia law?  No, just a reminder, perhaps, that the censorship boards are terrorist-affiliated, very very misogynist and backwards, prizing virginity, which is something only a very sexually insecure, small-dick punk would want, with no idea of what's involved in getting a girl to loosen up. There, I said it.

That's what that moron Sam Neill in Jane Campion's THE PIANO (1993) also doesn't understand. He'd be much happier if he just rolled with the sensual blowback from his new wife's affair with Harvey Keitel. But Neill is so sweaty and repressed and easily led along by colonialism's backwards ideas of propriety that he thinks it's much saner to mutilate her hand instead. In short, he is a natural-born censor.

Censors even insisted husbands and wives had to sleep in separate beds, which makes no sense if you're trying to endorse marriage as desirable. No doubt sex was present, but censors suspected even husbands of turning into rapists once the lights were out, though of course the night table between the beds was considered be enough to repel them. Laymen will also bring up the rule of lovers having one foot on the floor on each side of the bed but I've never seen that. Still it's pretty damning evidence of the sexophobic Catholic censor board.

Thus it's natural that one of the most interesting ways the filmmakers sought to baffle the censors is through elapsed time (the way lovers in the 20s would fool the dozing chaperone by moving the clock back).

It took most of the later 30s (from when the code was implemented in the back half of 1934 through to the late 60s) for screenwriters to bamboozle the censors while providing what the code was all about -- enough doubt over what happened in the fade out to let innocents think nothing happened and laid adults to know something did. Two examples most film fans should be familiar with are CASABLANCA (1942) and THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). The former cuts from an embrace to an airport watchtower and back to the lovers, still dressed, smoking and looking out the window. Since it's only later that night, and the lovers are still formally dressed, they can smoke and look contented.

In FALCON, there's a fade-out with Bogart leaning down to kiss Mary Astor that moves away from them (we never see them kiss, just Bogart bending down past the window towards where she's sitting) and out the window, where a figure in a trench coat watches up at the window like a ghost wondering if a womb might be going up for rent. We move from this to the next morning but the censors couldn't stop it because a) we never see them even kissing before the fade out, and b) the assosication with danger (the gunsel) and sex is subtextually implied anyway, and c) they are very far from the bed at the fade out, and not even shown in any representational manner.

But the easiest way to baffle and flummox the censors was love in the afternoon, which is a common French practice, as I never get tired of mentioning, and which decadent continental-minded directors and screenwriters use to their advantage, making fun of the censors' lack of earthly carnal experience as they do so. Here are some worthy examples:

BABY DOLL (1956)

Elia Kazan's masterpiece takes the “did they or didn’t they” aspect of production code censorship and makes it the focus of the story, something they could never forgive him for. Here the censor / prurient viewer stand-in for whom all things must be clear and literal (hick cotton gin owner Karl Malden) goes insane trying to figure out whether the hazy dissolve in the nursery where Vacaro takes a nap in baby doll’s bed late in the afternoon signifies they had sex. 

And this was the way Hollywood dealt with the issue of “did they or didn’t they" --the narrative split. If you expect a yes or no answer and really try to find one, you will go insane. In the tree of sex, the cardinals can rest easy in one corner, and the horny bald-spotted Maldens can go nuts in the other... it must be so, or society cannot function. BABY DOLL calls attention to this split however, and ridicules those who would prefer one side over the other... if you feel the need to insist "they did it," you are a pervert, and if you insist they did not, you are a prude. As such, BABY DOLL poses an affront to the pious and phony moralizing of so-called "decent" citizens, which may account for the huge Catholic protest the film created.

After Vacaro and Baby Doll wake up from their nap, neither Archie Lee nor we in the audience know if they did or didn't have sex. Rather than confront them directly, Archie Lee hems and haws around the issue, and Baby Doll and Vacaro play up their flirtations... but is solely for Archie's benefit? At least partly, yes. What makes this scene so “dirty” is not the seductive play between Vacaro and Baby Doll, but its performative aspect. They exaggerate their seductive fire for each other in order to enflame the jealousy of Malden. Their kisses are passionate in direct relation to Malden’s proximity; the harder Malden tries to get a clear yes or no, the steamier their interaction gets.

The lesson to be learned is how to let go of control: Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression and playful retreat, an ebb and flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Thus play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role, without any forward move on her part leading immediately to a man slobbering all over her. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex, Vacaro forces her to sign the statement against her husband for burning down his gin. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "underdeveloped" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly -- one dissolve between a kiss / fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out, stretching that black bar until it forces Malden into a corner.

LOLITA (1962)

A whisper, a fade, no mention of anything ever. But what did happen in that hotel room the next morning? We're still wondering... in removing anything remotely even double entendre, the film makes Debbie Reynolds movies look raunchy by comparison, yet the whole film fairly sizzles over because of our fascination, or censorial-prurient desire to look deeply into the did they/didn't they crevasse... (more here)

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)

It's kind of weird to think that Billy Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON came out a year after BABY DOLL. It's classy enough for the 30s but naughty enough for the early 60s. (Wilder was an unrepentant fucker-with of censors). Audrey Hepburn visits millionaire Yank wooer Cooper at his killing floor hotel suite (which he keeps stocked with a band of serenading gypsy troubadours) only in the afternoons, while her detective father Maurice Chevalier is at work (Chevalier gets a lot of cases trailing errant wives to Cooper's apartment), then splits in time to deal with her dull musician geek boyfriend, cello homework, etc.). She acts all worldly and experienced, almost a burlesque of the women she reads about in her father's lengthy file on Cooper, and slowly uses his own playboy image to slowly infuriate him with jealousy ("if it's any comfort to you, Mr. Flanagan, you are the first American in my life"), gradually shifting the power seat from his worldly wiles to her playful manufactured put-on. Her elaborate imagination with conjuring alpine guides, Spanish bullfighters, and Dutch alcoholics recalls the Lady Eve train scene. Meanwhile the censor gets easily sidestepped through ingenious pans away from the lovemaking to the swoon-worthy gypsy musicians, each song keyed to a stage in the seduction. The censor can't say shit about an orchestra, but when we pan back it's clear something has happened. As long as they're still on the couch, and more or less dressed (even if the clothes are mussed and they can't find a shoe or two), and it's not yet night, all is well, as far as 1957 is concerned.

I really resonate with this film for a few reasons, and one of them perhaps hinges on my whole enamored feeling towards the French cinq a sept (5-7), a tradition whereby one visited one's mistress between work and going home for 7:30 dinner. I still long for mine, now some seven years gone. Notes Chevalier in Wilder's film, "In Paris people make love . . . well, perhaps not better . . . but certainly more often. They do it any place, any time," but the film didn't do well, and as Film Projector notes, a lot of that was maybe the age difference:

Hollywood has a long tradition of teaming older men with younger women (and also that there is psychobiological evidence to explain such mutual attraction: men tend to equate youth in women with fertility, while women tend to equate age in men with the stability and material resources necessary to maintain a family), and such a romantic pairing as Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn—although certainly not fashionable in today's more age-conscious world—doesn't seem entirely implausible. (more)

Damn straight, age-consciousness --one is a dreamer wooer quite getting along in years, the other Hepburn in prime gamin beauty and jubilance, innocent but visibly intrigued. May-December relationships are as stigmatized today as gay relationships used to be. But it goes deeper than how an older man is in a much better position to benefit a younger woman, sharing wisdom and gallantry galore, while all a younger man can really share is surly petulance and vitality. I also think that goes both ways, and older women should take younger men lovers as often as they please. Why not? It's good all around, and might even save this fucked up country from its current quagmire of gender and age relations. And it's very French, n'cest pas?

But rest assured, these relationships exist, behind closed doors, denied in public, deep in the closet, and safe from the censors by making love mainly in the afternoons (by evening, the old man is usually too tired anyway, at least pre-Viagra).

ON THE TOWN (1949)

The war was over but girls were still being nice to guys in the service, and a certain sexual leeway was perhaps implied, especially between the working girls of New York (or San Francisco as with Dorothy Malone and that cute cabbie in THE BIG SLEEP - 1946). Once she gets rid of her roommate, taxi driver Betty Garrett all but devours Sinatra during the afternoon while Gene Kelly chases Miss Turnstiles and fellow sailor Jules Munshin hooks up with sassy sketch artist Ann Miller. We don't see much of that hook-up but it sure is great watching Garrett devour Sinatra: "I like your face," she tells him. "It's empty, know what I mean?" At least she keeps her goals reasonable -- going for Frank. "I knew you'd come back. They all come back." And since they all meet later, 8 PM I think, up in the Empire States Building, the unchaperoned nooner between Frank and Brunhilde (as Garrett is named) goes off without a hitch. The censor dozes right on through it. It was the war after all, or had been. Girls could hook up with sailors before marriage as long as they didn't stay the night and made it to their wartime riveting job on time the next morning. (see also High Society Matrons of Frank).

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

"...On the other hand -- we never know what happens in between being 'closed for the evening' and going out - he doesn't kiss her goodbye or anything - yet perhaps less gallant or experienced viewers will instantly assume it was a full on tryst, a 5-7 shag (vs. snog). Well, the censor is a great one for compelling lovers to not kiss and tell; the time between the glasses coming off and the paper cup toast and the "so long pal" exit are strictly their own business. At any rate, it would be pretty hard to believe even in the 60s-70s that something so cavalier as a sexual hook-up between strangers could go on during regular working hours and not leave any repercussions. You could say it's all just a male fantasy--all those young., available women in all those working wartime women (taxi driver, etc.) leading old Doghouse Rileys like Marlowe to gambol wild and free amongst them while the boys labored overseas. Further wartime references are scattered through the dialogue ("How are you fixed for red points?" Marlowe asks Bernie, meaning to corpses and culprits he has along with their guns, red points being weekly ration booklet meat allowances.)" - full review

 CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972)

Eric Rohmer is a quiet genius when dealing with sexual tension of first kisses and hook-ups, and that genius is on big display in this tale of a Parisian man who runs into an old friend-of-an-old-girlfriend and starts hanging out with her in his lunch hour, gradually leading closer and closer to cinq a sept territory while his pregnant wife waits at home. Sure it might be a mid-life crisis and sure I can't give away the ending, but it's a great example of that love in the afternoon...

In closing, sex in the afternoon is such a great loophole to the conventional mores of the life-choking censors that it's naturally Parisian in origin. Paris, where people have sex rather than obsessing about it (to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich). What a delight censors can be confounded so easily!  Here sex is displayed all over the place as the ultimate status symbol: the stakes are high, and every one is holding out for a perfection they'd only run away from (or would run away from them) if they ever actually found it. We put all this pressure on the third date sleepover to deliver a wonderful mythic poetry that we can spend the next week analyzing and/or bragging about in long phone conversations with our friends; is it any wonder we're so single and so eager to settle? Ladies and gentlemen, let our great country discover the cinq a sept, and stop expecting sex to deliver all the answers... only film can do that.

RED DESERT (1964)

It's Antonioni's big art joke --the modernist response -- writ fast to the frisson disconnect of censorship - Vitti, her husband, her maybe lover, and a few assorted wives, secretaries, managers and swinging bosses all rendezvous for lunch at a brokedown shack by the docks. A conversation about the aphrodisiac properties of fertilized bird eggs leads to one of Vitti's few outbursts of ease-in-the-skin, "I want to make love," and this big bedroom space in the shack, painted red, is gradually full of bodies all being drawn to each other, dancing and slowly acting on their lusty interlocked blase cool. Have they gathered for an orgy? Or is just one almost happening? Is it a matter of Italian censorship that Antonioni can't be specific or is this the modern art genius? Yes, of course it's both, as in all these 5-7 movies. If we demand to know what did happen in the fade-out then we are like Karl Malden in Baby Doll, and we will lose our mind! Ah... Modernité!

Anyway we have the dissolve to darkness and when we fade in it's clear some great energy has been expended, or they ran out of wine or there's just one of those momentary lulls that occur sometimes among people having a really good time and almost having an orgy, but then backing off and feeling their good mood turn on them, pissed they chickened out. We're not meant to know, and by accepting never knowing we realize that's the point and that's why Vitti is crazy because even she doesn't know yet there is no knowing. She's the 'awake' character beginning to realize that all these other people know stuff she doesn't, that they have lives between frames, scenes, before and after, which she lacks. But is there really anything to lack? Again, that's the genius - no questions - we must embrace ambiguity as a pre-requisite to waking from the dream of consensual linear time. The result of our collective slumber to our true reality is what is poisoning the world. We miss the beauty of the trees so lose them. We 'don't know what it's got til it's gone,' but even when it's gone we don't know - unless we first get enough perspective, enough distance from our beds. So wake up, sleeper! The nap is over, the mistress is sated and watching the clock. The censor will be getting home soon; time to feign dignity and dishwater dull decency, until tomorrow, same time, same brief candle. The best part of it all is, you can wait.

Midlife Crisis Superstar: Humbert, Lo, and the Bait-Switch Cycle

I'll be a guest on Film Geeks tribute to Kubrick podcast this Dec. 5: here's an excerpt from my 2009 Bright Lights Film Journal article:

"All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives"  Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA:
 
It's hard to believe now in our jaded world but in the late 1960s/1970s, even first-class artist filmmakers such as Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange) and Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) earned X ratings, making their movie posters reverberate in the deep recesses of my child mind, seeing their ads in the paper and getting a sharp chill in the base of my spine. Back then, an X could be artistic as well as dirty and/or ultra-violent, and thus these films still carry the potent whiff of genuine danger, whose loss Camille Paglia (and this essay) laments. The danger still exists, but we are disconnected from the accompanying desire. It is too late to feel things deeply, in the flesh. We check in with our bodies periodically, during a commercial break, or when it's time to pass the joystick. Only later, when the TV and iPods are all shut off, do the demons and traumas make themselves felt.

Like most of Kubrick's work, Lolita (1961) reflects this gradual rotation ever further into the simulacrum but from an earlier epoch, going from the refinements and closeted perversities of pre-war Europe to the prefab motels of post-modern America. These were the days when police could arrest you for transporting a minor over state lines, or--depending on the state-- kick you out of a hotel for having a woman in your hotel room who wasn't your wife (marriage licenses were like cohabitational authorization cards). So, to unravel this, let's clarify that there are three levels of time at work in our appreciation of Kubrick's film: 1) the span of time since Lolita was released (half a century ago); 2) the span of time of the actual movie (2 ½ hours) and 3) the time spanned in the movie's mise en scene ("i.e. 3 years later, etc."). Kubrick ingeniously unites all three, anticipating its future cult status in the century of evolving mores to come--ensuring it will never be outdated or 'campy. As it meanders from shrill bedroom farce to tense Freudian scenes of insane jealousy, the film itself becomes full of deep, sad shadows. This progression into madness is similar to another of Mason's roles, that of the cortisone-maniac dad in 1956's Bigger Than Life. The monstrousness of Humberts actions becomes apparent only later, when he's struggling to keep his mask on in the face of all the subterfuge --the self-fulfilling prophecy of jealousy. Prior to this, of course, any man of reproductive age may well identify with his morality-melting attraction (Sue Lyon, initially fetishized for maximum impact, being older and more developed than, say, the girl described in Nabokov's book). But as he becomes more and more odious in his jealousy, we come to identify more with the shadowy libidinal freedom offered by Quilty' presence. In a meta parallel, we move as a world from the Mad Men permissiveness of the early 60s, to the giddy high of the late-60s genuine sexual revolution through to the launch of the AIDS miasma and into a simulacrum fog,  Kubrick's film being with us every step of the way, seeming to predict every step to the libidinal excess of the 70s and back down into 80s repression. Sex now involves so many layers of protection we're better off just imagining it --in your shadows of your own mind. Lolita beats us there too, for--to get the film past the censors--there's no sex, or even kissing, in it anywhere whatsoever. You need to understand the 'code' to infer as you will. 

In the pre-VHS 1970s we wished for the some weird new form of cassette, where we could compile our favorite movies around us as a fort, to not be enslaved to the TV Guide (I sometimes arose at dawn just to see some bizarre piece of crap like Zombies on Broadway). In the 2010s we are stuck, like James Woods in Videodrome, with our head halfway into the cathode ray mouth. Our Satanic wish has become fulfilled beyond our wildest dreams, in excess to the point of nightmare. Now that the entire world has access to all the movies ever made,  being surrounded by favorite movies carries no currency. As Baudrillard put it in The Conspiracy of Art: "It is useless to be dispassionate in a dispassionate world. Being carefree in a divested world has no meaning. This is how we become orphans."

We can see the bait-and-switch of the simulacrum in the commercials shown before movies in theaters now. I remember seeing two commercials back to back after not having seen any for a while (I gave up cable for a few years) and was flipped out of my gourd. The first ad was one of those anti-drug messages, aimed at teens: "Coke Kills." The next is a Coke (as in Coca-Cola) commercial, where a sad little boy takes a sip from his glistening black bottle and flowers and rainbows shoot out of his head: "Coke is life." These are cinema's options — the approved drink is named Coke (which originally had cocaine in it) but is pitched at having the exact effect of the one drug it does not contain, the forbidden drug from which it gets half its name --"the real real thing." This is a very devious switcheroo, regardless of whether it's for our own good. My shrink told me the other day that one of the strands of drugs I was on was scheduled by the FDA on the level of Valium, etc. And why? Because the rats liked it. They kept pressing the lever. No other noticeable problems to long-term use but the rats liked it. They just don't want us rats to have a good time, or is it that, like our concerned parents, they want us to stop watching old movies and go outside and get some fresh air?

I'm all for keeping irresponsible people away from drugs, but the switcheroo presented by these two coke/Coke commercials is a Pavlov equivalent of forcing the rat's hand on the lever while giving him nothing in return. If you're feeling high off drugs, why tell your doctor? Now he has to do something about it, the twin serpents on his profession's fraternal emblem obligate him to halt your ecstasy. The doctors hold the keys to the kingdom, dangling the precious pills above our heads like we're doggies. If we pant and beg, no treat; we have to seem utterly disinterested. Thus displays of enjoyment are rendered dangerous to actual enjoyment, unless the real desire is masked in in 'unconvincing' fakeness. A person craving a renewal on their Valium prescription must 'perform 'badly' that things are now all right, i.e. that they are only feigning the freedom from anxiety that Valium should bring. Baudrillard's dispassionate orphans see their dead parents alive in old videos, in the movies of the past, where enthusiasm, love, and desire can stay potent under the condition they are acted rather than real.

This cycle of bait and switch is the feature selling point of Lolita as it revolves gradually from the bourgeois end game hungover morning after (death) of Quitly's assassination, to bucolic innocence of Humbert's first visitation to the home of Lolita and her mom, to gradual dissolution and back again. Lo's glasses and pregnant belly (at the end of the film) prove her to be a less shrill but nonetheless archetypal blonde suburban mom a la her mother, whom Humbert visited with equal muted horror at the beginning of the flashback. A similar revolution on the meta level mirrors this: as the film grows less and less "contemporary," it grows less "obscene." Yesterday's pornography is today's literary canon, though a return to said literature being burned in the street in some Handmaid's Tale-style future seems still distantly possible. Canon as it my be, good luck finding Lolita in your high school library these days, especially in the South.

Wherever you stand on it, Lolita is an odd-film-out in the Kubrick oeuvre, particularly in that it's one of his few films that attempt to deal with sex, his Achilles heel. Always squeamish about consensual coupling, from Humbert's inability to perform husbandly duties with Lo's mom, to Sterling Hayden's mad general in Dr. Strangelove: "I don't deny myself the company of women, Mandrake. I just deny them my essence' to Tom Cruise's self cockblocking in Eyes Wide Shut, impotence is one Kubrick's main recurring themes, whereas 

To see how Kubrick's 1961 film is really the first 1970s movie, we have to look way back before that, to the late 1950s: repressive Cold War paranoia was giving way to the emerging strands of freethinking that would gradually weave into the rope of countercultural "free love." Sex, which had been safely encrypted in the pre-suburban "Our Town" style of living before WW II, came roaring up from the land of the repressed in cinema via films such as 1954's Baby Doll. The Kinsey Report had made "the sex life of suburbia" into a hot topic, igniting the suburban elite craze for Freud and psychoanalysis. Why not swap wives when we're all comfortably middle class and hip to the Oedipus complex, and drunk? Kinsey made it seem like everyone else was doing it, and we wouldn't want to be left out. 

Scandalous intellectuals-only satire, however, would only do for so long. Without the same amount of repression to work your lusting Wildean wit against, a book or movie like Lolita ceases to be subversive. Viewing the film in the 1990s, it was no longer risqué but a shrill bedroom farce in the style of Fox's early 90s sitcom, Married with Children (which also featured a hot, nubile daughter perched scandalously amidst a family of raving sex maniacs). What was once scandalous has become cartoonish.

Lolita sits at the tape mark on a Moebius strip of time dealing with our national obsession for nymphets: A huge backlash against the loosey-goosey sexuality of children (epitomized by Brooke Shields in the 70s) began in the early 1980s, with day-care molestation scandals and TV's America's Most Wanted. Parents went from letting kids run wild in the streets if they were old enough to walk ('70s), to freaking out if they're out of our sight for a second ('80s), to accompanying them to school and having to be forcibly prevented from sitting through their classes with them (today). Yet nowadays, in more depressed areas, like the mall, you see the 13- to 16-year-old Hannah Montana nymphets glorified in short shorts they never would have been able to wear outside the house even in the '70s, and a salon tan, and bottle-blond hair, Britneyed to the nines, wobbling around the mall on their high heels in the company of their obese moms who either don't seem to notice or enjoy the looks of hungry males by proxy. 

The idea of women teachers sleeping with young male students, meanwhile, has become top news and fodder, and multiplexes pack in single working women on Friday nights to see Notes on a Scandal, Sex and the City, Elizabeth, The Reader. Koo Koo ka Choo! Just keep it on the screen and out of the real. And let's not forget the dour, craftsmanship-suffocated Lolita remake by Adrian Lyne! As with everything they touch, the bourgeoisie keep the sex and scuttle the myth. They first demonize and then overvalue that which was better off without their meddling or even knowledge.

What's most altered our perception of Lolita's "sexuality" is the tumbling down of the enforced moral code, thanks to the "did they or didn't they" question on which it hung being flipped upside down through hipster hand magic. As a code-breaker in this sense, Lolita really has a lot in common with Baby Doll, i.e. the way Quilty and Lolita work together to exploit Humbert's insane jealousy, driving him to murder, just as in Baby Doll, Carroll Baker (below) and Eli Wallach deliberately provoke and tease the dirty-minded hick played by Karl Malden until he runs amok with a shotgun. The 'did they or didn't they' question on both of their minds is something neither they nor we ever learn the answer to.

Each self-diagnosed cuckold (including ourselves) wants to "know for sure" what the code can never explicitly say. The code itself becomes the meta-textual source of anxiety, a stand-in for the insanity of jealousy, itself a smokescreen for the universality (and therefore mundanity) of our hitherto most private sexual impulses--and thus the films' code-enforced sexual ambiguity serves as a "self-fulfilling prophecy," driving the Joseph Breens into lynch mob madness. No matter how successfully they censor, their own curiosity drives them insane. There's always one viewer who believes it's possible to 'know' what Lolita and Humbert did or didn't do that morning in the hotel room with the cot, or what happened during the nap with Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker in the room with the crib in Baby Doll. 

That one lone dude in the theater is the censor.

(read full article here)